UCSD Business Students Help Launch Venture Fund

The students at UC San Diego are increasingly entrepreneurial. The huge success of the UCSD Entrepreneurship Challenge is just one indicator. Another indicator is the new venture capital fund (The Rady Venture Fund) that students from the UC San Diego Rady School of Business will help to manage.

Read Dean Calbreath's write-up of the fund in the San Diego Union Tribune here.
Read Bruce Bigelow's story at Xconomy here.

Yesterday, I was editing a video interview we shot with Raj Krishnan, a recent Bioengineering PhD from the Jacobs School who also won various parts of the UCSD Entrepreneurship Challenge last year and is now in the midst of running a company focused on early-detection of cancer (Biological Dynamics)...Krishnan was talking about the importance of the entrepreneurship challenge for fostering the start-up spirit on campus.

PS: unrelated link from Voice of San Diego: UCSD Professor (James Fowler) Gets Colbert Bump

Wireless in the Wilderness

"Wiring the Wilderness" is the NSF headline for their story about UC San Diego's HPWREN.

Photo caption: An HPWREN automated digital camera on Lyons Peak, Calif., captured an image around 8:00 p.m. on Sunday, July 23, 2006, that shows the extent of the Horse Fire. The camera remotely collected many images that day, which the researchers were able to use to better understand the wildfire. Photo credit: HPWREN

HPWREN is a National Science Foundation funded network research project, which also functions as a collaborative cyberinfrastructure on research, education, and first responder activities. It includes creating, demonstrating, and evaluating a non-commercial, prototype, high-performance, wide-area, wireless network in San Diego, Riverside, and Imperial counties. The network includes backbone nodes at the UC San Diego and San Diego State University campuses, and a number of "hard to reach" areas in remote environments.

Dr. Michael J. Sailor Seminar Today, January 8th at 2pm

Talk title:
Functional silicon nanostructures for in-vitro and in-vivo diagnostics

Who is speaking?
Michael J. Sailor, Ph.D.
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Department of Bioengineering, and Department of Nanoengineering, University of California, San Diego

When and Where?
Department of Bioengineering and the Institute of Engineering in Medicine BE281
Friday, January 8, 20102:00-3:00pm
Fung AuditoriumPowell-Focht Bioengineering Hall
University of California, San Diego Map to Location

Abstract:
Porous Si possesses several properties that make it advantageous for medical diagnostic applications, including low toxicity, high surface area, tunable pore sizes and volumes, and flexible surface chemistry. In this talk, the electrochemical synthesis and use of nanostructured porous silicon films, microparticles, and nanoparticles will be described. The use of the photoluminescence and reflective optical response of these materials for in-vitro and in-vivo sensing and drug delivery applications will be presented.

For a complete listing of bioengineering seminars, go to:
http://be-web.ucsd.edu/events/seminars

UC San Diego's Green Ink in the LA Times

On Decebmer 27, 2009, the Los Angeles Times ran a story about Byron Washom, UC San Diego's first director of strategic energy initiatives. In other words, he's the "green czar of UCSD."

Read Tiffany Hsu's LA Times story here.

Here is more info on Byron Washom from UCSD.

Video Contest for Jacobs School Students

San Diego, CA, January 05, 2010 -- Calling all Jacobs School engineering students—both undergrads and graduate students. Share you best video stories about your research, academic experiences and engineering-related projects. Video Contest runs January 4 to February 15, 2010.

Got a cool research project? Tell the world with video.

Want to share your Jacobs School experiences with future students? Get on camera!

Details
Digital entries only (DVD or USB) .
Run times no more than 3 minutes.

Prizes!
First Prize: $200 gift card at the UC San Diego bookstore
Second Prize: $100 gift card at the UC San Diego bookstore
Third Prize: $50 gift card at the UC San Diego bookstore

Submissions:
Name, email and phone number with entry to:
Communications
Jacobs School of Engineering
EBU-1, 7th Floor

More information:
Cheryl Harris, Ph.D., Director of Communications, Jacobs School of Engineering.
cdharris@ucsd.edu

Deadline: February 15, 2010.

Whales, Art and Nature Reserves

Here are three links related to UC San Diego that I came across this morning going through my email, after the year-end break.


California gray whale migration has begun, and the UC San Diego Birch Aquarium is a good place to start your search for a glimpse of the whales along the San Diego coast.
Read a round-up of whale-watching options in the North County Times

Catch up with the Birch Aquarium on Twitter.

The Jacobs School is getting a house on a roof!
Read about it in the San Diego Union Tribune. Here is an excerpt from the UT story by Robert Pincus about the next addition to the UC San Diego Stuart Collection:

Looking toward the 30th anniversary of the collection next year, [Mary] Beebe is raising money and awareness to install Korean-American Do-Ho Suh’s “Fallen Star” as the collection’s 18th work. It would consist of a modest suburban-style home with landscaping on the rooftop of a parapet that is part of a building in the campus’s engineering school. Suh is on campus next week to work on details of the proposal and speak to an invited audience at UCSD’s faculty club.

Suh will also give a second talk at UC San Diego on January 13.

UC San Diego Natural Reserve System
The UC San Diego Natural Reserve System (http://nrs.ucsd.edu/) includes the Dawson Los Monos Canyon Reserve, the Elliott Chaparral Reserve, the Kendall-Frost Mission Bay Marsh Reserve, and the Scripps Coastal Reserve. The reserves support university-level teaching, research and public service by protecting key areas of the natural environment.

Boeing 787 First Flight

I just learned of another way in which engineers from the Jacobs School are involved in the Boeing 787. Zachary Workman graduated from the Jacobs School in Spring 2009.

Workman interned with Boeing during his final year at UCSD, and he been working full time for the the last 6 months on the Dreamliner.

Lots more information on the first flight of the Boeing 787 here:
http://787firstflight.newairplane.com/ffindex.html

In December 2009, I highlighted the work that structural engineering professor Hyonny Kim has been doing on landing gear for the Boeing 787.